Top Lackawanna County business stories in 2010

The year 2010 will be remembered as the year Northeast Pennsylvania tried to the put the worst of the Great Recession behind it.

As the economic foundation shifted, the region shed manufacturing jobs and lost overextended national retailers and long-established restaurants.

Here's a look at some of the top business stories:

n Long the largest private employer in the greater Scranton area, Cinram Manufacturing fell victim to the fast-evolving digital age. The Olyphant company was the proving ground for the digitization of music and video in the 1980s and '90s as one of the largest manufacturers of compact discs and DVDs. But consumer preferences moved toward downloading media via computer from the Internet. Prerecorded discs became less relevant.

Cinram employed 1,800 people locally in January 2007 and has shed employees ever since. The company begins 2011 with about 500 workers at the 1-million-square-foot plant in the Mid-Valley Industrial Park.

n In the midst of the Great Recession, a visitor to Scranton could easily get the impression the city was thriving.

For most of 2010, the city was host to several large construction projects as cranes cut the skyline and machinery growled at the Commonwealth Medical College and the University of Scranton. Major commercial residential projects with significant public financial support were completed, including renovations at Renaissance at 500 and the Connell Building makeover. Both have commercial components. As the year closed, a new headquarter for Tobyhanna Federal Credit Union went up on Franklin Street.

n Conceived in the 1980s as a savior of downtown Scranton, the Mall at Steamtown found itself wounded by competition and the recession's retail collapse. National chain stores, core mall tenants, found they had overbuilt or just went out of business, leaving vacancies that the mall scrambled to fill with non-traditional tenants.

Mall owner Scranton Mall Partners requested to defer payments on a federal loan administered by the city Office of Economic and Community Development. The partnership owed $612,480 on a $4.3 million loan it 2003, and wants to suspend payments until July 2013.

For much of the year, the mall's vacancy rate hovered around one-fourth as national tenants such as Aeropostal, Eddie Bauer and Rave pulled put up stakes.

n Once one of the soundest community banks in the region, Dunmore-based First National Community Bancorp Inc. continued to confront problems in 2010. On the heels of more than $30 million of losses, the bank fired its independent public accounts and labored under the close scrutiny of regulators as it sought to comply with a range of performance measure required by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency.

The bank ended the year by issuing a statement of non-reliance on the preceding 18 months of earnings and missed its deadline for the third quarter results.

In the last three years, FNCB lost half its board of directors to resignation or scandal. Attempts by former chairman Louis DeNaples to sue the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to lift their ban on him from serving on a bank board failed, so far, in 2010.

n The empire built by Brian J. Murray, once one of Scranton's most prominent civic leaders, downtown developers and political power brokers, was partitioned off in the wake of mismanagement and scandal. He remained under house arrest awaiting arraignment.

His business sold in 2009, the building that housed it and several others was auctioned off in August. Mr. Murray and his former executive Christine Oliver-Shean, 51, each were slapped 20 charges in August, accused by the state attorney general of a range of illegal activity, including forging insurance documents to cover up the lack of insurance for clients.

Some of the alleged victims includes colleges, resorts, and large companies.

Contact the writer: dfalchek@timesshamrock.com

We welcome user discussion on our site, under the following guidelines:

To comment you must first create a profile and sign-in with a verified DISQUS account or social network ID. Sign up here.

Comments in violation of the rules will be denied, and repeat violators will be banned. Please help police the community by flagging offensive comments for our moderators to review. By posting a comment, you agree to our full terms and conditions. Click here to read terms and conditions.